My father was hard to know, and gave little indication that there was much to know. He claimed he remembered almost nothing about his childhood. He only ever recalled one incident. It was about the first time he came home from college on holiday break. He was sitting in his parents’ home, waiting for my grandfather to return from work. When my grandfather came through the door, he greeted the family dog first, even though he and the hound had only been apart for the day and my father had been gone for months. That’s the story.

The final, heartbreaking paragraph:

When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, “You waited for your father to die, why couldn’t you have waited for me to die?” I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden. Despite all my initial conflicts about trying to reconcile the father I had as a child to the one I have now, I am thankful that he is happy, that he did not waste another second. Now there is someone to know.